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Health & Fitness

Frame Your Home And Your Heart With Joy, Furnishings And Serenity Elita Sohmer Clayman

A little home decor can uplift the occupants and coming home every day will lift your spirits.

An interior decorator designer was written up in the Sunday paper about her beautiful home. She said “This home has allowed us the opportunity to create the lifestyle we want to live. It is the place we raised our son and celebrated friendships, and has been the canvas for all of the creativity we needed to express. Home is the place where we start and end each day. Yet we seem to overlook the correlation between the state of our homes and the state of our lives. We have the ability to bring beauty, balance, calm etc. into our lives by manifesting these things on the physical plane around us.” Kim Eastburn

What an extraordinary correlation between home, heart, happiness and contentment.  When I was growing up, I never dreamed I would have the lovely home I live in now. We had a nice row house, clean, pleasant and put in an oil burner after we got rid of the coal furnace. I can see Dad going down to the cellar where the furnace was and stoking the coal and putting some extra in. I forgot how the coal was delivered, must have been when I was in elementary school and not there when it arrived.

When we got an oil burner, we felt we were millionaires and it was a much cleaner and safer way to heat the house. Whatever new material item we finally could afford, that made us again feel like a millionaire in those days of 1940 to 1948. Dad was able to add new and important features and we stayed there until 1948 when we sold the house and moved to an apartment. Then it was the landlord’s job to install new and more modern pieces to his own building. Dad would pay for things to enhance the furniture and we bought our first TV set when I was about fifteen. It was a beautiful piece of wood with the screen in it and there were no remote controls in those days; so you had to get up out of your seat and manually change one station one to two to three. That was the limit of the stations available then.

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Kim mentioned above said it right when she said you have the ability to bring balance and calmness to your surroundings. Whatever you choose that makes any room more desirable to you; that is your prerogative and choice. Let no one advise you that this should be green instead of the purple you chose for your bedroom. Let him or her do the green in their rooms.

Dad had a walk-in closet built in the old home and when we moved, that was the thing he missed the most about being a home owner. He loved that walk-in room and stood there when it was finished being built and surveyed it and its beauty and size like he was a little boy at holiday time waiting to open up all his presents.

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When Kim said the home is where we start and end each day, I add to it and say that is where we start the day, enjoy the middle of the day if we are home and especially enjoy the weekends from start to middle to end of day and surely look forward to the next day upon awakening. When I pull up in my car to the driveway of my home, even after forty-eight years of doing that, I feel overwhelmed that this is mine, all paid for now and all sparkly, remodeled and lovely. It is more than I ever thought I would have and I appreciate it even though it has been that long of a time in ownership.

To be a home or condo owner elevates your thoughts all the time on new ways to spend some money and to even add new items, decorative or needed and so the home is like your baby; you are always there for it to make it more beautiful and  appealing. The appealing is to you the occupants and whether you go to Home Depot for a pair of curtains you hang yourself, or call in a decorating specialist and get custom made draperies, the end is still the same. You have framed the windows, sills and space with a delightful covering, inexpensive or expensive and that is the windows you observe all the time, inside or outside. When we first moved into our apartment with the extra bedroom for our first child, I bought cute little teddy bear embossed curtains and was able to buy a rod and hang the one window myself. Then I was able to hang readymade draperies across the large living and dining room area. Somehow they did not fall nicely and when I was outside looking in, I saw big gaps, wide pleats and I did not like that. They stayed the same way for the year I lived there. When we bought this home, my first expenditure was to get custom made draperies for our master bedroom. Oh how wonderful I felt when the drapery company sent the installer out and I kvelled (was so proud) at the way they looked. I could not stop looking at them and during the day would run back there to gaze at their beauty. They were a gorgeous white material and pleated professionally, not like from the Home Depot and atop them a valance with purple braid across it and pretty purple balls hanging from the draperies.

This was a first and delightful venture in interior designing for me and it was fun and quite expensive for those days. I used for my rationale in spending about two hundred dollars then for these draperies/curtains. I felt they would last for a least ten years and that was about twenty dollars a year for such gratification.

That is how I figure things out when I want something expensive. I divide the time in months or years that I will be viewing, liking, loving or using it. Then it comes out mathematically to a very low number and that rationale can be soothing to the purse or wallet. If you use them for many years and it gives you complete satisfaction and or happiness, go for it and make yourself enjoying your home, house, apartment or condo up to great heights of happiness.

Your home, no matter how modest or how beautiful and extravagant it is, your start and end theme and the rest of the theme should be that you are living where you want to be, why you want to be and most of all, because you want to be there.

Brighten it up often and that need not be very expensive. A new throw pillow, a new can of paint to paint a ceiling or one wall, a new throw rug in a room that does not cost too much, an inexpensive mirror hung over an old sofa will make the room seem newer than it is.You will receive nachas (joy and happiness) and you will spend probably less than thirty dollars. This little bit of adding something brings a new glow to any room and most of all to you the occupant and believe me, it heals the soul when the soul may need some stimulation. It helps your mind to be more content and most of all it adds to your serenity.

Serenity is what we all desire and at the end of the day, peacefulness and fulfillment is what we want and being in our own home is as Kim said “it is the correlation between the state of our home and the state of our lives.”

 

 

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